Moving on previously announced plans, the AT&T ECOMP SDN platform will allow for open source development enhancements
AT&T said it is moving on previously announced plans to migrate its enhanced control, orchestration, management and policy platform to the open source community.
The telecom giant said the platform, which controls its move into the software-defined networking space, is now open to developers interested in building upon the already established software code. AT&T said it is working with the Linux Foundation on the structure of the open source release.
“This is a big decision and getting it right is crucial,” said John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president for technology and operations at AT&T. “We want to build a community – where people contribute to the code base and advance the platform. And, we want this to help align the global industry. We’ve engaged a third-party company to be the integrator and provide support in the industry for the ECOMP platform. And we’ve received positive feedback from major global telecom companies.”
In touting the platform, AT&T said ECOMP is “mature, feature-complete and tested in real-world deployments. And, we believe it will mature SDN and become the industry standard. Releasing this software into open source levels the worldwide playing field for everyone. Most importantly, we believe this will rapidly accelerate innovation across the cloud and networking ecosystems.”
AT&T unveiled the ECOMP initiative earlier this year, which it said was designed to automate network services and infrastructure running in a cloud environment. Donovan said the carrier had been working on ECOMP for nearly two years, tackling the project due to a lack of guidance for NFV and SDN deployments in a wide area network environment. ECOMP is said to provide automation support for service delivery, service assurance, performance management, fault management and SDN tasks. The platform is also designed to work with OpenStack, though Donovan noted it was extensible to other cloud and compute environments.
The carrier recently explained in a blog post that one of the goals for ECOMP is to provide for the “design, creation and lifecycle management of virtualized network functions” in a “flexible, dynamic, policy driven manner” allowing users to “dynamically control ECOMP’s behavior without changing the system software.”
“ECOMP’s policy component allows us to express, interpret and evaluate policies, and then pass them on to other ECOMP components or network elements for enforcement,” said Jen Yates, assistant VP at AT&T Labs. “ECOMP policies capture the service provider’s intelligence – including proprietary domain knowledge related to how a service provider manages networks and services.”
The carrier earlier this year detailed ECOMP’s data collection, analytics and events component, which it said was “responsible for collecting, managing, storing and analyzing data for an ecosystem of control loop automation systems and network and cloud services.”
“Imagine a world where everything is data driven,” said Mazin Gilbert, assistant VP for intelligent systems and platform research at AT&T Labs. “Your network is resilient, self-healing and self-learning. You can create, remove and instantly expand smart virtual functions – southbound network devices (i.e. firewalls, routers and switches) or northbound cloud services (customer care, ambient video, virtual reality, ‘internet of things’). This is possible with the power of ECOMP and DCAE.”
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